The Scene You Never Noticed Was In Both Disney Pixar's Up And Cars 2
Certain things happen in every Pixar movie, whether it's about toys that come to life, talking fish, or a family of superheroes. Sometimes, those similarities go beyond story tropes and are baked into the animation itself. While there are plenty of Pixar movie details that only an adult would notice, this split second similarity would be overlooked by anyone other than a child watching these movies dozens of times: Blink and you'll miss it, but Up and Cars 2 share the exact same jungle.
It's an unlikely pair, as these two movies are about as different as any two Pixar films. Cars 2 takes the anthropomorphic cars Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) around the world as part of the first World Grand Prix, delving into a little international espionage along the way. Up, meanwhile, follows the adventures of the widower Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) and young Wilderness Explorer Russell (Jordan Nagai), who fly to South America via a house lifted by balloons.
Different as these two films may be, they were released just two years apart, which must have made it easy enough to borrow a background from one and insert it in the other.
Dug runs into the jungle, and Sir Miles Axlerod comes out
In Up, Carl is frustrated by Kevin the bird and Dug the dog (Bob Peterson) following him, so he throws one of the tennis balls from the bottom of his walker into the jungle for Dug to chase after. Then he throws a piece of chocolate for Kevin to chase. He and Russell walk away, ditching the two animals. It turns out that the jungle Dug runs into is the exact same background as one that appears in Cars 2.
The scene happens when Mater is watching the Mel Dorado Show. It's a story on the oil billionaire Sir Miles Axlerod (Eddie Izzard) and his journey to become the first car to ever circumnavigate the globe. Ironically, he runs out of gas and becomes stranded, emerging from the jungle a month later, running on a fuel created from jungle forage. A clever kid noticed the similarity.
Pixar is known for leaving Easter eggs in their movies that connect its films — leading fans to come up with an elaborate theory that all of the studio's feature films belong in the same universe — but the connection between Up and Cars 2 seems like it could have simply been a cost-cutting trick. It is far from the first recycled animation scene, something the older Disney films did as a matter of course.